A team of undergraduate students at the University of Washington will soon release a dating app called Violet. It will be limited just to UW students when it first launches. The dating app will have a unique revenue model, relying on monetizing its relationships with local restaurants rather than charging its users a subscription fee.
Trevon Gagnon, a senior at University of Washington Bothell, is leading the project. His team recently showcased Violet in the Dempsey Startup Competition at UW’s Foster School of Business.
Knowing that men in particular struggle to get matches and replies to messages on dating apps, our first question to Trevon was about whether there’s anything different about Violet that helps improve the odds for its male users. Watch the 5-minute video below.
‘It evens the playing field a little’
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview in the video above.
Trevon Gagnon (teaser clip): I’m currently a business student based at UW Bothell and I’ll be graduating at the end of winter quarter.
Blair Daly (voice-over introduction): Trevon Gagnon is a college student here in Seattle. He and some fellow students are creating a dating app called Violet. When it launches, it’ll be specifically for University of Washington students, and it has an interesting revenue model that relies on its partnerships with restaurants. I started by asking Trevon this question…
Blair Daly: Finding matches and getting dates can be hard. How do you talk to men about why they should try Violet? Perhaps there are things about your dating app that improve the odds of success for men who are looking to match with women?
Trevon Gagnon: We narrow the dating pool down to just college students, so you’re not being compared to people who’ve had several years of experience in the workforce and might be earning six-figure salaries. You’re competing with the other college students, which evens the field a little bit.
On top of that, what women are looking for when it comes to a prospective partner, and they’re looking to date fellow college students — it’s a little less judgmental. Although women are generally pickier with partners than men are, we see that when it comes to college what matters more is what a guy is able to show about himself when it comes to personality, instead of it just being about his wealth or how good his facial hair looks.
So we like to think — and some of the research we’ve done and the conversations we’ve had with people show — that Violet makes a great case for college men. When it comes to using dating apps generally, we like to push the idea of self-improvement. Improving aspects of yourself and making yourself more likeable is the first step in getting more matches on dating apps.
“I feel like UW definitely needs something like [Violet], because from what I have heard and from my own experience, dating culture at UW is not the best,” second-year student Vibha Vasireddy said. “I’ve noticed that people are always looking for a way to put in the least amount of effort, which this app kind of helps with in a way.” – The UW Daily, “Launch of UW specific dating app delayed”
When is the official launch of Violet?
Blair Daly: If some young men and women who see this video aspire to try out Violet, can they do so now or is this something coming in the near future?
Trevon Gagnon: They could do so now, as we’re currently in a small closed beta testing period on TestFlight, Apple’s beta system. (Contact UWViolet@gmail.com to request to be a beta test user.)
We’re pushing our official launch to the end of August or beginning of September because our connections with fraternities and sororities is important, and the fall is the next time they’ll be able to have parties and events. We want an explosive launch with 1,000 users on our launch day. We think that’s only possible around the beginning of the school year.
Blair Daly: I imagine you’ll have to be doing some in-person outreach, even door-to-door, to the fraternities, sororities, dorms…
Trevon Gagnon: Yep, that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been talking to Theta Chi, a fraternity on UW’s Greek Row, and they’ve agreed to do a few parties with us… [Continued in the full video]
See also: The University of Oregon has a Men’s Resource Center | Interview with Arian Mobasser
